Moab Utah
artists. Moab is home to many local artists and nationally
known artists. These talented people work in a range of mediums
from visual arts through literary to musical. Each month Moab
Happenings features one of our talented local Moab artists.

Artist of the Month - September 2003

Cynthia Aldrich:
Close to Homeby Sydney Francis

Autumn Archway

I have been wanting to interview
Cynthia Aldrich for years. Having seen her work at various
galleries around town, I have always been attracted to her
masterful use of vibrant color and her painterly, but controlled,
brushstrokes. In July and August, Aldrich exhibited her
most recent oil on linen paintings in the Castle Valley
artist’s show at the MARC. Again, in viewing this
show, I was compelled to her local landscapes and the interplay
of complimentary colors on her canvases.

Aldrich’s recent works, done in 2002 and 2003, show
scenes from her immediate environment: fall foliaged trees
obscuring Castle Valley vistas; gigantic rose bushes exploding
into the hot, dry desert; and intimate flower portraits
set in the lust greenness of her garden. My first impression
of these paintings, before talking to Aldrich, was the predominance
of green imagery set in the familiar local landscape. I
was both soothed and baffled by these images, because I
could not imagine such a lush oasis among the scorching
heat and dryness of this high desert terrain. However, upon
entering Aldrich’s property in Castle Valley it became
clear to me the source of her inspiration and imagery for
these paintings. Her yard is tall, green, and fertile with
brightly colored flowers and densely verdant foliage. And
the green is strikingly set off by the surrounding red canyon
rims and rock formations.

Calm before the Storm

Aldrich, a full-time professional
painter, spends much of her free time in the garden cultivating
a sense of balance in her life. The fast rush of effulgence
inspiring her paintings requires a stabilizing, rejuvenating
counterpart, which Aldrich finds in gardening (of which
she is also very gifted). Her creative practice is intrinsically
bound to her personal and spiritual growth, and therefore
through the active balance between gardening and painting
she creates an environment, which is conducive to her personal,
as well as artistic, growth.

Aldrich’s garden, like her paintings, express a dynamic
relationship between the wild and the tame, the volatile
and the controlled. For example, in her painting entitled
“The Wealth of Autumn” she uses pure, unrestrained
color to show fall foliage reflecting from the bank of a
body of water. Her composition and painting techniques are
refined and controlled, but the finished painting still
maintains the rampant spontaneity and freshness of the scene.

Curious about what motivated Aldrich’s use of color,
I probed her about her background and training. She replied
that her use and treatment of color in her paintings is
intuitive to her and that she has never had a teacher who
emphasized color harmony and/or color techniques. One of
her current paintings that best expresses her command of
color is “Autumn Archway”, which represents
some cottonwood trees right off the back of her property.
“Autumn Archway” glows with her use of complimentary
colors: the golden yellow-orange of the leaves is set-off
by its opposite, blue-violet, painted into the sky. Similarly,
the green-yellows in the trees’ canopy is balanced
by its compliment—the reds and red-violets found in
the tree trunks and shadows of the cottonwoods. The image
is further activated by the strong diagonal lines created
by the placement of the branches.

In the Garden

Aldrich admitted that she
has always been drawn to bright color and that she has always
known that her path was as an artist. In grade school, she
remembered that she would do drawings to accompany her book
reports. One, in particular, was of a green turtle with
a bright red cap and colorful markings on its shell. Her
second grade teacher Gracie Curtis asserted to Aldrich at
7 years old, “ you’re an artist,” in response
to an imaginative portrait she drew for her schoolwork.

Her family, accepting her art talent encouraged her to seek
a creative career in a more practical field, such as fashion
or interior design. But having entered architecture school,
and later graphic design, at the University of Washington,
Aldrich quickly realized that she was a fine artist and
not a designer, and thus she finished her degree as a painter.

In addition to her oil paintings, Aldrich has illustrated
several acclaimed children’s books, like Fun is a
Feeling and All I See Is Part of Me. Fun is a Feeling shows
illustrations in watercolor and colored pencil, which display
fantastical and enchanting pictures portraying fun as a
feeling. All I See, in contrast, shows soft dreamlike imagery
done in colored pencil on watercolor paper.

Poppies

Aldrich’s current goal
with her painting practice is to combine the creative imagination,
like that which she incorporates in her children’s
book imagery, with the crisp freshness and inspiration she
draws from her landscape painting. In other words, the real
landscape would provide a point of departure for paintings
more invested with her imagination. This current goal, furthermore,
symbolizes the next frontier of intimacy and inter-relationship
between the fertile aspects of her self, exemplified by
the lush and vibrant details of the landscape and the fecund
creativity of the imaginative terrain.

In September, Aldrich’s local landscapes will be on
display at the Overlook Gallery on Center Street.